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Hare attended Balliol College at Oxford. He served in the Royal Artillery and was a prisoner of the Japanese from the fall of Singapore in 1942 to the end of the Second World War. This experience had a lasting impact on his philosophical views, particularly his belief that one had to imagine oneself in another person's position. After the war, Hare returned to Oxford (1947-1983), where he held various positions, including White's Professor of Moral Philosophy (1966-1983). His last academic association was with the University of Florida, where he was Graduate Research Professor of Philosophy (1983-1994). Some of his students would later become famous, such as Brian McGuinness , Bernard Williams and, perhaps best known outside of philsophical circles, Peter Singer, who has explicitly adopted many elements of Hare's thought.
A product of his time, Hare was greatly influenced by the emotivism of Alfred Ayer and Charles L. Stevenson, the ordinary language philosophy of J.L. Austin, and the later philsophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hare was also greatly influenced by utilitarian philosophy and by the ideas of Immanuel Kant. Hare held that ethical rules should not be based on a principle of utility, though he was willing to take into account utilitarian considerations in making ethical judgments. This distinguishes his views from more classical utilitarians (e.g., Jeremy BenthamJeremy Bentham ( February 15, 1748 June 6, 1832) was an English gentleman, jurist, philosopher, eccentric, and legal and social reformer. He is best known as the founder of utilitarianism. The life of Jeremy Bentham Born in Spitalfields, London into a wea). Indeed, Hare is as much of a Kantian as he is a utilitarian, as he makes clear in his book, Sorting Out Ethics.
In a series of books, especially The Language of Morals, Freedom and Reason, and Moral Thinking, Hare gave shape to a theory that he called universal prescriptivismA philosophy of modified Kantianism, originated by R. Hare, who believes that our moral judgments should be of the form "I ought to do X in Y situation," whenever all of the relevant, universal properties of the facts that obtain in any similar situation. According to it, moral terms such as 'good', 'ought' and 'right' have two logical (i.e. semantic) properties: universalizabilityThe concept of universalizability is one which was set out by the 19th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as part of his work, the Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals. It is part of the first formulation of his categorical imperative, the idea t and prescriptivityPrescriptivity is a term used in meta-ethics to describe a feature of moral theories. A prescription does two things: # Describes the world the way it is, and # Sets forth a situation that one would like to see the world become. It tells us how the world. By the former, moral judgments must identify the situation that they describe by a finite set of universal terms (this excludes proper names, but not definite descriptionA definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun that picks out a specific individual or object. For example: "the tallest student in the class", "the first monkey in space", "the 42nd Ps). By the latter, moral agents must perform those acts that they consider morally obligatory whenever they are physically and psychologically able to do them. Hare noted that the combination of the two properties leads to a certain form of consequentialismConsequentialism is the belief that what ultimately matters in evaluating actions or policies of action are the consequences that result from choosing one action or policy rather than the alternative. Defining consequentialism Consequentialism is sometime, namely, preference utilitarianismPreference utilitarianism is a particular type of utilitarianism which defines utility in terms of preference satisfaction. So, like any utilitarian theory, preference utilitarians claim that the right thing to do is that which produces the best consequen.
To see how this works, the reader can imagine the following situation. Suppose you require a big sum of money and ask a friend to lend it to you. He refuses. So you claim that it is wrong for him to do so. 'Wrong' is a moral term, so, according to Hare, you must abide by its logical properties. The first property, universalizability, demands that you give a description of the situation using only universal terms. So you say:
Whenever I ask a friend for a big sum of money, it is wrong for her to refuse to give it to me.
But this violates the universalizability requirement, insofar as the description contains the terms 'I' and 'me', which do not designate a universal property, but denote an individual instead. So you try again:
Whenver someone asks a friend for a big sum of money, it is wrong for her to refuse the request.
This new description satisfies the universalizability requirement, as all its terms are universal. This requirement aroused from the first property of the moral terms; let us now examine that which arises from its second, i.e., prescriptivity.
We must, then, see whether you are willing to act according to your initial judgment. At first sight, it would seem that this does not apply to you: if you consider it wrong for your friend to refuse to lend you a big sum of money, it is your friend, not you, the one who should be acting accordingly. However -and here is where the two properties combine and the philosophically interesting results appear-, universalizability allows for the same judgment to be made irrespective of your position in the situation. In other words, as you had to deprive the description of its particular (i.e. non-universal) terms, it is now impossible for you to exclude yourself from the possibility of being in the situation that your friend was. So, by universalizability, if you happened to be, not the one asking, but the one asked for the money, the same moral judgment ought to apply; and, by prescriptivity, you would have to act accordingly.
If you were not prepared to do what the judgment asked you to do, i.e., lend the big sum of money, then you would be violating one of the requirements of morality, and in fact you wouldn't be uttering a moral judgment at all. To re-enter the moral discourse, you would have to modify your original judgment so that, once universalized, you would still be able to act in the way it would ask you to act. By a series of (universal) conjectures and (prescriptive) refutations -akin to philosopher Karl Popper's falsificationism (see Freedom and Reason, chapter 4)- you would eventually arrive at the right moral judgment, which would be the one you would prefer in all the possible situations. In each case, however, one cannot simply put oneself in another's shoes, as it were, one must also adopt the universal properties of the perspectives of the other person. Universal prescriptivism, thus, leads to preference utilitarianism. And so, according to Hare, does kantianism: to demand, as Kant's first formulation of the categorical imperative does, that you could will that your maxim be a universal law, is to ask the moral agent to prescribe that judgment that she could accept were she in any of the positions involved --which of course is exactly Hare's point.
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